Photo courtesy of Islandia

Rafael: In a nutshell, who are you as a researcher?

Islandia: As a researcher invested in community knowledge creation and creative research, my scholarship and teaching are in dialogue with my long-standing practice as a lesbian and queer community organizer, performer, and as a cofounder and the current coordinator at the Community of Machistán, Digital Collection of Art, Media and Memoria (“Memory”), the MachaMeMe. This is an intimately-scaled digital archive by and for the lesbian nightlife community of Mexico City in the 2000s. I come from a family with roots in the US and Mexico and I hold both passports. However, Mexico City is my hometown and this necessarily shapes the perspective of my academia, and is key to how I view the world and design my research. I studied my Undergrad in History and Masters in Geography at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (“National Autonomous University of Mexico”). I migrated to Canada as a graduate student several years ago; my PhD in Information and Sexual Diversity Studies is from the University of Toronto.

M.E.: Can you share some of the research-creation projects you’ve been involved in, and the ways they connect to or expand on your academic research?

Islandia: In Mexico City, I was an artist/activist, aka artivist within lesbian and queer collectives that organized lesbian parties and queer cabarets outside of established commercial nightlife circuits, and I eventually became a de facto archivist. In the collectives I was a member of, we thought of our activities as a form of radical political activism in the face of gendered discrimination and economic disparities on the scale of the urban nightscape of Mexico City, as well as the larger scale of systematic misogyny and femicide, which reached an inflection point towards 2006 when the government launched its so-called War on Drugs. Our mission was a transformative material struggle for spatial justice; to create and hold literal space for queer togetherness and the collective pleasure of creating art and sharing fun. These are things that hold little or no value in the capitalist logic of commercial light nightlife, and in the overall value system of colonial modernity in contexts across the Southern, Central and North Americas.

The ephemera, decaying wardrobe, photos, and other nightlife debris that I accumulated over the years in the mess of my drawers, closet floor, under-bed space, and hard drive, eventually became the foundation for creating the MachaMeMe, and shaped my PhD project. Under the supervision of TL Cowan and Jas Rault, I wrote my dissertation entitled “Stor(y)ing Mi Desmadre: Trans- Feminist and Queer Community Archival and Digital Custodial Praxes in Latin America” (2023). In it, I establish how–in the face of the systematic discursive and material marginalization of queer communities in Latin America–these communities have come together in the last 10 to 5 years to create self-organized grassroots community archives. My framework was built on understanding the centrality of nightlife for trans, lesbian, and queer communities, as well as valuing our messy personal collections of seemingly random objects (a.k.a. trash), personal effects, and mementos as queer and Latin American infrastructures of resiliency, custodianship and transmission of community values and memories.

Rafael: How do you reflect on the connections between your PhD research and your current postdoc work?

Islandia: My current research project, “Digital Memoriografía,” I investigate the act of public truth-telling that queer grassroots community archives carry out by merely existing publicly, as well as through counter-hegemonic discourse circulated their vibran, social media accounts, public-facing digital catalogs, numerous exhibitions and in-person public events. Here, I am inspired and informed by transnational and anticolonial critical performance studies and collective labour research, such as the works of Marcela Fuentes and Rafa Grohmann. To synthesize my framework, I designed the portmanteau memoriografía (“memoriography”) by mingling memoria (“memory”), historiografía (“historiography”), and coreografía (“choreography”). The word memoria is widely used in Latin America, and particularly by marginalized communities, to refer to the articulation and circulation of hegemonically-silenced histories of resistance. Meanwhile, I take historiografía as the theory and practice of creating historical text, and coreografía as the intentional, communicative, and coordinated performance of gestures and movements. By combining memoria with historiografía, I account for how these archives shift established notions of what data, sources, information, and knowledge-making means. By adding coreografía, I’m signaling the political intentionality of highlighting their labour as self-organized archivists in the public identity these archives promote. I argue that memoriografía unsettles the structures that constitute what is knowable about the past; hegemonic histories that imply, and are implicated in, hemispheric-scale genealogies of coerced gender and sexual norms.

I argue that the work of my interlocutors makes critical interventions in the dominant local, national, and hemispheric-scale narratives of development, progress, democracy, equity, and urban renewal. At the same time, this means that I take intellectual leadership from my sites of research and interlocutors to understand the epistemological contributions they make by establishing the evidentiary status of queer messes, and treating them as systems of knowledge-holding and knowledge-transmission worthy of becoming foundational collections in community archives.

Daphne: What’s your star sign?

Islandia: I would love to know, based on everything I just explained, what you think my star sign is, ha! My sun sign is Taurus with Libra rising, the two signs that are ruled by the planet Venus. I’ll end this with a non-attributed and random quote from a quick Internet search I just did on what that means: Venus is “the planet associated with love, beauty, pleasure, and harmony in astrology. This shared planetary ruler [of Taurus and Libra] gives these two signs a natural understanding and appreciation for aesthetics, luxury, and partnership.”

Follow Islandia’s work with CLCF here.